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Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-9644734

1527-1943

César Domínguez,

Translation Studies and Practices

It is difficult to classify David Damrosch’s book Comparing the Literatures. At first glance, it appears to be a comparative literature textbook, with an introduction and first chapter devoted to the origins of the discipline, followed by seven chapters that address seven keywords—emigrations, politics, theories, languages, literatures, worlds, and comparisons—and a final chapter of conclusions. In itself this is a significant milestone, for no single-authored textbook on comparative literature had been published in the United States since Claudio Guillén’s (1993) Challenge of Comparative Literature. As Guillén’s textbook is a translation from a 1985 Spanish original specifically conceived for Spanish academe, Entre lo uno y lo diverso: Introducción a la literatura comparada (Guillén 1985), one may go back even farther to Robert J. Clements’s (1978) Comparative Literature as Academic Discipline: A Statement of Principles, Praxis, Standards. The lapse of forty-two years and the broader paucity of textbooks in US academe speak to the state of the discipline locally. Additionally, the fact that Damrosch’s (2003) book What Is World Literature? redrew the disciplinary contours globally introduces greater expectations for this new publication seventeen years later.The discussion on world literature is a second thread that runs through the book, revealing a tension between, on the one hand, a scholar who emphatically acknowledges being “a comparatist” (x), influenced by his condition as a child of “missionaries” who “could absorb an international outlook from [ . . . his] famil[y]” (99), and, on the other hand, an object of study—world literature—that he posits simultaneously as a “field” and a “discipline” (268). It is telling in this regard that the chapter titled “Comparisons” follows the one titled “Worlds.” This tension may be read within what Damrosch calls “inclusive and exclusive visions of comparative study” (9), and its basis in what I would call an exercise in self-observation shows Damrosch to be a model of professionalism and academic ethics. Observing the growing scholarship on world literature since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Damrosch equally challenges some of his own past claims—as when he pinpoints that Dionýz Ďurišin’s (1992) book Čo je svetová literatura? (What Is World Literature?) “remind[s] us that the contemporary discussion of world literature is by no means only a North American or post-9/11 phenomenon” (259)—and reaffirms others in response to critiques.The book has another thread that brings to the fore Damrosch’s understanding of research on comparative literature as essentially linked to teaching, which he calls our way “to intervene on our campuses and societies at large” (10). This view is encapsulated in one of Damrosch’s definitions of world literature—a mode of reading—and embodied in his edited collection Teaching World Literature (Damrosch 2009) and the coedited Longman Anthology of World Literature (Damrosch and Pike 2008). The background of materials and references is so rich and vast that Comparing the Literatures could serve as the source for a range of undergraduate and graduate syllabi. Damrosch notes that in the United States “many programs in comparative literature took shape in the 1950s and 1960s and have not been fully rethought since then” (5). As a resource, his book contributes to, and advocates for, a discussion of “clear parameters for teaching, research, and program requirements” (2) to replace the aging institutional apparatus.The tone and style of Comparing the Literatures are Damroschian avant la lettre. As I did, many readers will recognize topics and literary works that Damrosch has discussed in conferences and events across the world, and those who have heard him speak know his ability to captivate an audience. The power of his presentations lies in his mastery of oral delivery and his clear, elegant prose, with embedded comparisons and suggestive puns. That Comparing the Literatures translates Damrosch’s style beautifully onto the printed page is particularly felicitous for those who have not heard him in person.In all this, Damrosch’s main and most frequent point of reference is Harry Levin’s presidential address to the American Comparative Literature Association at Indiana University in April 1968. Levin (1972: 75) argued that “a noncomparing comparatist might be compared with a violinist who disdains to use a bow and thereby limits his performances to a sequence of pizzicati.” Reviewing the state of the discipline, Levin (1972: 90) asked the members of the audience to “compare the literature.” In Damrosch’s intervention, the imperative is no longer to compare the literature but to compare the literatures. What comparatists need to ask themselves and their students is how we can “best address the many disparate literatures now at play in literary studies, and what . . . we really mean by ‘comparing’ them” (1).No summary could do justice to the wealth of writers, works, and critics discussed in this book, so my recommendation is that readers just lose themselves in this celebration of what comparative literature is and aspires to be. A question mark, however, hangs over the issue of who such readers might be. Because this is, in a very restricted sense, a textbook, one might think of undergraduates enrolled in an introductory course to comparative literature. Though these students would certainly benefit from reading Comparing the Literatures, such benefit would be obtained only through several readings, incorporating the many books and sources that Damrosch invokes. For example, his discussion of the linguistic limitations of the Warwick Research Collective’s (2015) Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature requires deep familiarity with the collective’s work to grasp the consequences of Anglocentrism in postcolonial studies. A typo in this section (the only one I found that goes beyond diacritics!) creates a mysterious Spanish modernist writer—Pío Bareta (i.e., Pío Baroja), who is mentioned three times on a single page (193).A more viable readership would be graduate students faced with the current state of the discipline, mainly the ones who still have time to rethink their doctoral projects and acquire specific linguistic skills. They will be provided with food for thought on two items key to the future of comparative literature. The first is an appropriate choice of foreign languages: “Each of us does need to know whichever languages are most important for our teaching and research, and we need to decide just how well we need to know each of them for our purposes. We also need to know how to work intelligently with translations when necessary” (173–74). The second is a new kind of comparison, namely, “wider comparison,” left undefined by Damrosch, which I would characterize as non-self-evident comparison. One example will suffice to expose its mechanism. Whereas J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has been traditionally compared to Beowulf (as suggested by thirty-seven entries in the MLA International Bibliography) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (as suggested by twelve entries), Damrosch discusses a cluster of wider comparisons for The Lord of the Rings that includes Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 in terms of their critiques of industrialization and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels in terms of their “intensive discussions of language in a world of inscrutable signs” (260).The most obvious audience for Damrosch’s latest book, university professors of comparative literature—and also of national literatures, for “studies within individual languages increasingly involve comparative explorations” (1)—face “a paradigm shift of the sort that occurs only once or twice in a century,” so that “an effective response will require us to rethink the grounds of comparison from the ground up” (5). From the outset Damrosch makes clear that Comparing the Literatures has been “written within a U.S.-American context but with regular reference to initiatives and formations abroad” (6). In this regard, some statements should be adequately contextualized within US academe and not applied globally but contested and adapted to the rich variations of comparative literature across the world.